Introduction

More Alaska voters than ever are voting by mail or in early voting this year. This page tracks the numbers as reported by the state.

The data come from the Alaska Division of Elections website It’s a 10-page pdf, so I ran a script using tabula-py to extract the data. Additional summary information is available here.I have republished the data here, where you can download the reports from each day. I had a google sheet that was updating automatically, but that kept breaking. Other caveats: this involves getting reports from all across the state, so there are probably reporting delays.

If you see any errors, contact Ben Matheson. Disclaimer - this may not be fully accurate or up to date. It also may break at any time. This is not official or affiliated with anything…enjoy!

Statewide Early Vote + Mail Ballots Sent, Received, and Rejected

These are the raw numbers for ballots sent to mail voters, ballots receieved, and early votes that were accepted.

Mail Ballots Sent Mail Ballots Received Percent Received Mail Ballots Rejected
119,267 87,782 73.60% 331

Note: these numbers should match what the state has published here.

Overall Early and Mail Vote Compared to 2016

Mail Ballots Sent to Voters and Received by State

Vote By Mail per Alaska House District

Early Voting Totals Per House District.

Early voting started Monday, October 19th. Here are the raw totals of votes in each Alaska House District.

Mail Ballots Sent to Voters, Received by State, and Rejected

District Number District Mail Ballots Received Mail Ballots Sent Mail Ballots Rejected Early Vote in Person
28 South Anchorage 4837 6188 13 1989
24 Anchorage - Oceanview 3589 4608 6 1783
14 Eagle River/Chugach State Park 3356 4434 16 558
26 Anchorage - Huffman 3344 4311 9 1790
33 Downtown Juneau/Douglas/Haines/ Skagway 3292 5020 7 2553
21 West Anchorage 3290 4327 11 1735
27 Anchorage - Basher 3172 4111 8 1446
22 Anchorage - Sand Lake 3158 4039 7 1430
25 Anchorage - Abbott 2902 3846 11 1640
31 Homer/South Kenai 2844 4173 8 43
34 Mendenhall Valley 2786 4071 13 3974
18 Anchorage - Spenard 2738 3688 20 1606
20 Anchorage - Downtown 2713 3735 5 1702
04 Western Fairbanks 2614 3503 7 2354
16 Anchorage - College Gate 2587 3398 10 1210
35 Sitka/Petersburg 2399 3272 7 37
17 Anchorage - University 2345 3134 4 1337
23 Anchorage - Taku 2249 3018 11 1300
12 Chugiak/Gateway 2210 3030 11 2085
29 North Kenai 2174 3046 9 45
10 Rural Mat-Su 2047 2772 9 1903
30 Kenai/Soldotna 2010 2780 9 22
11 Greater Palmer 2008 2688 14 3272
13 Fort Richardson/North Eagle River 2007 2658 6 418
05 Chena Ridge/Airport 1992 2712 6 1858
09 Richardson Hwy/East Mat-Su 1957 2574 12 1523
06 Eielson/Denali/Upper Yukon/Border Region 1877 2407 3 533
08 Big Lake/Point Mackenzie 1647 2236 7 2116
01 Downtown Fairbanks 1603 2139 6 1425
07 Greater Wasilla 1596 2274 7 3104
19 Anchorage - Mountainview 1566 2167 5 731
36 Ketchikan/Wrangell/Metlakatla/Hydaburg 1552 2203 16 7
15 Elmendorf 1549 2209 12 684
32 Kodiak/Cordova/Seldovia 1473 2351 3 33
03 North Pole/Badger 1252 1692 4 1167
02 Fairbanks/Wainwright 1140 1492 4 902
37 Bristol Bay/Aleutians/Upper Kuskokwim 765 1191 8 61
38 Lower Kuskokwim 429 652 0 15
39 Bering Straits/Yukon Delta 335 524 3 425
40 Arctic 333 540 4 25
99 NA 45 54 0 0

Mail Voting Relative to Voter Registration and Voter Turnout per House District

For each Alaska House district, I have the number of registered voters (as of October 3, this report). You can see which districts are seeing more take-up of mail voting relative to their voter base. Additional this compares the 2020 completed mail ballots to the full 2016 election turnout.

This is not really finished yet. Also I just made up the regional labels.

Partisan Explanation on Vote by Mail

This looks at the relationship between relative vote-by-mail activity and voting results from the 2016 presidential election. The y axis is the percentage of mail votes returned relative to the total 2016 turnout. The x axis and color is the margin by which Donald Trump won or lost the district in 2016. The basic trend you see is that the redder the disrict, the less vote-by-mail there is, so far. The key exception is western Alaska (in the lower left), which voted for Clinton but is not seeing much vote-by-mail participation yet.

Voting Method Breakdown by House District

Mail and Online Rejections Per House District

About

The Alaska Division of Elections data is originally is published in a 10-page PDF that I parsed to extract the data. This uses a combination of R and Python. The Python uses Tabula to pull out the data. After that, an R script cleans out extra spaces, gaps, and labels the rows by house district and adds descriptions. I wanted to do everything in R, but I couldn’t get rJava loaded for the Tabulizer, so the tabula-py library ended up being more expedient.

This page is an RMarkdown document that calculates some summary stats, like percent rejected and then displays the data in several ggplot2 plots. The PDF parsing in particular may be brittle and this could definitely break at anytime.